Announcements

Obsidian Entertainment's massively successful crowdfunded role-playing game Pillars of Eternity has been given a worldwide release date of March 26. Weighing in at around $4.5 million raised in backer pledges and pre-purchase...

As some of you may recall, we took a break from streaming on Twitch.TV. There was a lot of reasons for the temporary halt in production, but we're ready to make a comeback.
We've had some time to mourn our trail-blazing...

If you are like me, you have not really followed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in a couple decades. The last thing I really remember was 1991's The Secret of the Ooze and Turtles in Time on the Super NES. Sure, I have hear...

John Romero, co-founder of id Software (Doom, Quake), is working on his first first-person shooter since Daikatana, he announced on Joystiq's podcast.
"I'm working on several games at once right now," Romero said. "But ...

While we wait for the last episode in season two of The Walking Dead adventure game, Telltale president Kevin Bruner and Walking Dead writer Robert Kirkman have gone ahead and confirmed at Comic-Con (and on Twitter) that there will be a third season.
I wonder if that gives clues on how the last episode might play out.

Nippon Ichi Software's new PS Vita title is Great Edo Blacksmith. It's coming to Japan on November 27. Gematsu reports, "players spend the remaining one year of their life as a blacksmith, with the goal of earning both a livi...

Paradox Interactive will have quite the lineup at Gamescom 2014. Hearts of Iron IV and the new RPG IP Runemaster, along with several "secret projects," will be among the in-house developed titles shown this year. Joinin...

Criminal Girls: Invite Only, a touched up version of the 2010 PSP game Criminal Girls, is coming to Vita in North America and Europe next year, NIS America announced.
Criminal Girls involves guiding seven girls through ...

Zelda Williams has had an interesting presence at E3 2014, and given her namesake it's not surprising to see her hanging around. But regarding her "extra special" surprise at E3 that we touched upon late in May, she may have ...

Holy destructible environments
Ubisoft closed off its E3 press conference with the announcement of a brand-new game, Rainbow Six Siege. The demo shown featured a 5v5 multiplayer session that had one team holding a citizen hostage and barricading the house...

Look at Dontnod, going from denying bankruptcy claims to working on a new game in partnership with Square Enix. We know little else.
"We're very excited to be working with Square Enix on our new game," Dontnod CEO Oskar Guilb...

Death and pizza parties
Night in the Woods is real cool. I've played it and loved what I've played, from the writing to the art style to the pierogi. I just want to curl up with it on the couch and now that's going to be easier than even because it...

It's been about four months since we first got the news that Irrational Games would be shutting down, and as some expected, some former staff have regrouped in a new studio called Day for Night Games. The studio boasts some b...

Kadokawa Game Studio's inaugural title, Natural Doctrine, is coming to the west thanks to NIS. The SRPG from Patapon director Atsushi li looks pretty interesting, though you can't really judge the game based on a CG trailer....

Videogames like to get highfalutin with their space concepts. Everyone's a bounty hunter or ace pilot of magic jedi planet saver or whatever. What about the folks just trying to get by that make space the place for all those...

And it looks good and spooky
I got a bit of a The Shining (stylistically crossed with Gods Will Be Watching) vibe in this trailer for Uncanny Valley, but that quickly jumped to more overtly terrifying fare.
Still impressive when a pixel art, 2D game can...

So, last year was Madden NFL 25, and this year is Madden NFL 15? I can't wait for Madden NFL -5. Integers are fun, kids.
Anyway, here's a self-important trailer. Reminder: this is a game. It's a game of a game.
Madden 15 is coming to PS4, Xbox One, PS3, and 360 on August 26 in North America, August 29 in Europe. Voting for the next cover player begins May 8.

Coming to PS3, 360, Wii U, and 3DS this fall, a sequel to "an emotionless venture that's devoid of any soul or effort."
I guess Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, which is based on the new Pac-Man television series, did well enough to warrant a sequel.

Apr 22 //
Steven HansenRise of Incarnates (PC)Developers: Bandai NamcoPublisher: Bandai NamcoRelease: 2014
Rise of Incarnates will feature more than four at launch, but we were shown Mephistopheles (a transforming character), Ares (a summoner), Lilith (an agile transformer), and Grim Reaper. The latter is the best because he summons zombies and can ride on a tidal wave of them.
These character designs come from Soul Calibur and Tekken veterans who have teamed up with Gundam Vs. veterans for Rise of Incarnates. It's going the fighting game route of having its four payer battle arenas staged in famous cities -- London, Paris -- so hopefully we get a little less gray throughout the rest of post apocalyptia.
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"We've been developing this game for some years now and we've done a lot of market research as well. Some of the gameplay mechanics we found were still viable to western audiences, we kept and refined, but a lot of times we discarded them for something completely new. A large portion of the game is quite different from Gundam," Rise and Gundam Vs. producer Ryuichiro Baba explained.
It also runs in a different engine. Because it's a "new game for a new audience," there will be some general streamlining of more technical aspects of Gundam Vs. "The depth is still there, but it's more accessible." A familiar promise.
"Fans who played the Gundam Vs. series, they'll be able to pick it up and they'll get it pretty quickly," but the simplicity of the controls, standard across the characters, should allow anyone to try it out. "It's not like fighting games where you have to spend quite a bit of time learning the moves and such [for each individual character]."
Rise of Incarnates has been in development for several years. Namco Bandai sees itself as a late comer to the free-to-play market and, because of this, it has seen and learned from the missteps of its peers, explaining it was, "very sensitive about what users want," and would continue to iterate based on player feedback.
The first step was the most obvious: the monetization is largely cosmetic (buying outfits), side-stepping the "pay to win" stigma. But messing up that one at this point is like stepping on a rake. The real question will be if Rise of Incarnates can avoid an entire obstacle course worth of rakes. You can get some idea when it enters alpha testing.

But leaves the Gundams The 2 on 2 Gundam vs. Gundam series is as big in Japan as that full-scale Gundam model in Tokyo. It's also big on the Destructoid Forum, in that one Gundam fan keeps explaining how it's the best fighting game and tries to get...

Apr 22 //
Steven Hansen
Grid Autosport (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)Developers: CodemastersPublisher: Bandai NamcoRelease: June 24, 2014
I don't know a lot about the finer points of racing games. That's Dale's wheelhouse. Har har.
But I do know San Francisco, so I had to put the San Francisco street course through its paces. What you have is an admirable representation of downtown -- specifically, the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge -- that bleeds into a more forced, inaccurate version of Chinatown with race-appropriate wide streets. And San Francisco's endless hills are represented, but they are not as steep as they should be.
The result is what Grid Autosport is going for in being "not an arcade racer," but not a "clinical" sim racer, either. The landmark-pocked pastiche of San Francisco is a fun course to race on in a racing game. It's homage without being slavishly realistic.
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Grid Autosport's menu is minimal, mostly black and white. There are five race styles to partake in. Touring Cars is a battle with aggressive AI on typical racetrack. Street Racing plops you down in places like San Francisco and Washington D.C.
Endurance Competitions are long (around 10 minutes) night races where you have to weigh things like tire wear into your play style decisions. Tuner has drifting and time attacks. Open-wheel puts you behind powerful, delicate machines that will see you fishtail if you take corners badly.
In career mode, you choose a discipline to race in, which can be changed at the end of each season. You join a team and worry about hitting objectives while your team AI handles things like car upgrades and your racing partner (though you can set their AI in-race). The idea is to race well and get picked up by better teams. If you decide to try (and do well in) all the disciplines, you'll be invited to a lengthy competition that includes them all together.
This is a pared down departure from Grid 2, but "without ripping the fun out of the experience." There are difficulty settings (if you are capable of playing at higher difficulty, you get more rewards and can advance through the career faster) and the Flashback rewind button for taking a mulligan on mistakes. If only that was a thing in real life.
I had to use it a lot when I played. I kept taking corners just too fast or accidentally barreling into other cars while trying out Touring. I don't think I placed in the top five once. But it didn't feel insurmountable, and I think I would, as someone not well-versed, still enjoy playing and feeling out the finer points of handling and other race strategies. All the jostling was a pain when I was getting knocked about, but when I got a good handle at jostling back, it felt darn good.
I'll definitely need more practice at finding the right speeds to take different corners in open-wheel racing. I was fishtailing like crazy.
Autosport, which came about from a lot of dedicated fan feedback and collaboration with professional racers, is also doing a lot of community-focused things with Codemasters' RaceNet site. Social clubs are clan equivalents and clubs gain experience from member performance, ranking up collectively, along with custom livery and their own pages to check out the club's collective stats.
In online play, your cars earn experience used to unlock tuning options, but they also accumulate wear and tear. The cars you've been racing well with are better, but maintaining a newer car not put through its paces costs less. To go with the 12 player online play, there's also 2 player local splitscreen.
Now I'm going to go drive my real car like a real man to a real grocery store to buy some real cookies.

Be a good autosport and fetch daddy's carburetor so he can make his joke
Hot on the heels of last year's GRID 2, Codemasters is coming back with GRID Autosport, a "celebration of pure, unadulterated motorsport." This is going to be less of an arcade racer than GRID 2 ended up being, but without d...

Apr 11 //
Steven HansenProject Totem (Xbox 360, Xbox One)Developers: Press PlayPublisher: Microsoft StudiosRelease: Fall 2014
Project Totem is called Project Totem because you play as severed rungs in a totem pole. Simple enough. But you plays as rungs, plural, with an 's.' That's how plurals are made. In some languages. Anyway. That's where there's a nice twist, as you control two totems simultaneously.
The minimalist style doesn't default to pixel art or faux 8-bit. Rather, the inspiration stems from graphic design, so expect menus full pleasing colors and nice triangles. I hear blue is calming. The gameplay, on the other hand, owes itself to some classic design and a few contemporaries; for example, doing what Super Meat Boy still deserves credit for, it gets you back into the action fast post death.
And unless you're super talented and handsome and great at cooking like me, you may be dying often. Sometimes you're meant to as fast paced portions are designed to mess with you and trip you up on routine movements. It's not broken or malicious. It just plays on how we can get psyched out in platformers before muscle memory helps us breeze through.Anticipate jumps that aren't there.
In that sense, Project Totem is a bit like two different games. Much of the first run through involves learning how to work the puzzles. You start with consistent movement on your totems, making jumps in time, but alternating terrain occasionally loses perfect reflection and you have to be aware of where they both are.
It only gets more complex. There are colored gates that only the same colored totem can get through requiring a button press to swap spots, sometimes quick and often. There are also bits of magnetism that will attract or repel totems, which go beyond walking on the ceiling.
Often you have to jump large gaps with momentum, repel the totem away, and attract it back before you're carried into a hazard. Sometimes you're oscillating back and forth for a while. You'll also get stackable totems of the same color, double jumps, and a couple other abilities.
Once you can nail the levels as puzzles, you can work on the equally satisfying prospect of speed running and time trials to propel yourself on the leaderboards.
All runs earn you totems that stack on your personal, growing pole. And you can compare your pole to all your friends' and see whose is bigger. But it's not just whose is bigger. The better the run -- faster times and fewer deaths -- the better your totem reward. It's the difference between a blinging totem and a piece of plywood.
There will also be a daily challenge wherein one winner takes home a special totem piece. The team also hopes to implement ghost data to race against directly, but doesn't want to spoil puzzles. Leaderboards will be there at the least. There's a separate co-op mode -- local only -- available at the onset where you'll both control a couple totems and have to work together to get through levels. Communication and coordination is key. Or telepathy.
I fell into Project Totem's rhythm quickly and happily. All those years of ill-advised multitasking and split attention paid off. Who says you can't text and drive?

Can't beat that headlinePress Play proved it can make a platformer with Max and the Curse of Brotherhood, but it wasn't meant to test your muscle memory and invite speed running. It was a colorful adventure with some charm and plenty of stopping for...

Natural Doctrine -- Natty Doc to its friends -- is getting a digital and physical western release after its release in Japan today. The PS4, PS3, and Vita strategy RPG from Patapon director Atsushi Ii is coming courtesy of N...

Old school action platformer Momodora III has gone up on Steam Greenlight and it's looking cute as heck. Give it a vote, why don't you.
You can also play the first two Momodora games for free. They're available for download on Bombservice's website.

The wonderful Papo & Yo was successful enough for Minority Media to start production on a new game, Silent Enemy, which we haven't seen too much about in the year since its vague announcement.
It appears Minority is also ...

Race the Sun is on its way to PS3, PS4, and Vita this summer. It will be cross-buy and cross-save, meaning you buy it once and can access it on all three and, if you have a Vita, you can take your saves on the go because of Transfarring. I miss Transfarring.
Race the Sun? More like Race the Fun.

This game looks amazing. Duelyst, which I'm too in awe of to poke at the "y" in the title, started as a tabletop game that the team at newly formed Counterplay Games decided to turn into a videogame.
That vision has come stu...

If Angry Birds Stella was Rovio playing it safe (make the same game but the bird is pink, that way girls will know it's for them even though girls and everyone else already play Angry Birds), the newly announced Angry Birds E...

Mar 12 //
Steven Hansen
Razer Blade Pro (17")
The Razer Blade Pro is in an iterative year. Of course there has been an obsessive attention to making the laptop more powerful, abetted by Nvidia's Maxwell generation Geforce GTX 860M. With what is seen as the fastest mobile GPU, the Pro has seen 46 percent higher benchmark performance.
With the 860M comes a host of Nvidia Geforce features. ShadowPlay allows for easy live streaming to Twitch and ten-minute buffered game capture without performance issues while GameStream allows streaming from the Pro to a remote display. Nvidia's Battery Boost, meanwhile, can reportedly double battery life. Locking the frame rate to 30 will help with that as well.
Doubled RAM (now 16GB) and a fourth-generation Intel i7 have all been jammed into the Pro's consistent form factor. Razer is also pushing its Switchblade UI. The touch pad on the Pro is also a screen, which you can use to browse Twitter or watch YouTube -- even while you're playing a game. It's all customizable and Razer has more partnerships in the works with applications. A new Twitch app lets you watch streams on the little screen and even chat while the Windows 8 Charm app tries to pare down the new OS. Razer even co-developed a DJ app with electronic/dance artist Afrojack.
It starts at $2,299.
Razer Blade (14")
Here's where things get crazier. The (relatively) cheaper 14" Razer Blade started at $400 less last year. We expect technology to go down in price. I think we still do. I still do, anyway. But an edge-to-edge glass 3200 x 1800 10-point capacitive multi-touch display doesn't come cheap. And it looks incredible, thanks also to a 250 percent improved contrast ratio and 160-degree viewing angle on both axes.
In his review, Dale was disappointed with the Blade's lack of vibrancy and color in its display, particularly, "compared with Apple's MacBook Pro Retina." Razer clearly took that criticism to heart, delivering the highest resolution 14" laptop display there is.
Somehow Razer managed to squeeze that ludicrous touch display -- does that really make Windows 8 that much more usable? -- into its flagship gaming laptop without sacrificing its claims of being the thinnest and lightest in its field. ".7 inches thin," Razer explains in the same way my mother talks about how many "years young" she is. Sei vecchio, va bene.
The new Blade uses Nvidia's GTX 870M, a fourth-generation Intel i7, and a bunch of other computer parts (specs are on site, naturally) to deliver around 65 percent benchmark improvements. Which means when Battlefield 4 crashed, it wasn't the computer's fault, and Sleeping Dogs looked more vivid than ever and all I want to do now is play it more. The average FPS at 3200 x 1800 during its benchmark was over 50. You could probably run that on the battery for longer than my laptop will play a movie with the display turned off (critical warnings before one True Detective episode finished).
It starts at $2,199.

Razer? I hardly even know her! Every time I see a razor blade in person I have to pick it up. Those things are dangerous and shouldn't be left lying about. Kids could put them in their mouth or pigeons could weaponize them. Maybe mobsters will smuggle them...

Three former Disney Interactive developers have gotten together to form the much better named Shark Punch. On that there website (or embedded above) you can see a teaser for The Masterplan, a 70's styled heist game wherein y...

Majesco's indie publishing label Midnight City is bringing last year's surprise hit Gone Home to consoles later this fall, it has announced. Details on which consoles it will release for and when exactly are not yet availabl...